Главная > Реферат >Остальные работы

William
Shakespeare was born in 1564 to a prosperous leather merchant in the
village of Stratford-upon-Avon, in Warwickshire, England. He attended
grammar school, married an older woman named Anne Hathaway, and
eventually left Stratford for London to pursue a career in the
theater. Legend has it that Shakespeare began his career by holding
the reins of horses for theater patrons; in any event, he quickly
worked his way up the ranks of his chosen profession. By the early
seventeenth century, he had written some of the greatest plays the
world has ever seen, and was, along with Ben Jonson, the most popular
writer in England. He owned his own theater, the Globe, and amassed
enough wealth from this venture to retire to Stratford as a wealthy
gentleman. He died in 1616, and was hailed by Jonson and others as
the apogee of theater during the Renaissance of Queen Elizabeth’s
reign.

Shakespeare’s
works were collected and printed in various editions in the century
following his death, and by the early eighteenth century his
reputation as the greatest poet ever to write in English was well
established. The unprecedented admiration garnered by his works led
to a fierce curiosity about Shakespeare’s life; but the paucity of
surviving biographical information has left many details of
Shakespeare’s personal history shrouded in mystery. Some people
have concluded from this fact that Shakespeare’s plays were in
reality written by someone else–Francis Bacon and the Earl of
Oxford are the two most popular candidates–but the evidence for
this claim is overwhelmingly circumstantial, and the theory is not
taken seriously by many scholars. Today, Shakespeare is remembered
for the wealth of magnificent poetry and drama he left the world: for
his 154 sonnets, for Romeo and Juliet, Macbeth, A Midsummer Night’s
Dream, and many other plays–including the most celebrated work of
literature in the English language, Hamlet.

Written during
the first part of the seventeenth century and at the close of Queen
Elizabeth’s reign, Hamlet was probably performed first in July,
1602; it was first published in written form in 1603, and appeared in
an enlarged edition in 1604. Shakespeare often appropriated ideas and
stories from earlier literary works into his own plays, as was common
practice during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries; he likely
knew the story of Hamlet from an earlier German play, and from a
prose work called Hystorie of Hamblet translated from Francois de
Belleforest’s Histoires Tragiques, and from an ancient history of
Denmark, written by Saxo Grammaticus in the twelfth century. What
Shakespeare then made of this raw material–the story of a Danish
prince whose father is murdered by his uncle, whom his mother then
marries–may have been informed by a much more personal tragedy:
Shakespeare’s young son (whose name was Hamnet) died in Stratford
shortly before the play was written, which has led many critics to
speculate that Shakespeare’s grief for his son found expression in
Hamlet’s grief for his father. Of course, Shakespeare’s
intentions are entirely undocumented, and all assertions about his
inspirations and influences, as with so many claims about
Shakespeare, can only be speculation.

Characters

Hamlet – The
Prince of Denmark. Hamlet is the son of the late King Hamlet, and the
nephew of the present king, Claudius. At the start of the play,
Hamlet’s mother, Gertrude, has recently married Claudius, her dead
husband’s brother. When Hamlet learns from his father’s ghost
that Claudius murdered his father before marrying his mother, the
discovery propels the action of the play, as the young prince
grapples with the question of whether or not he should seek revenge.
A reflective and thoughtful young man who has studied at Wittenberg,
Hamlet is also prone to fits of passion and impulsive action.

Claudius – The
King of Denmark, Hamlet’s uncle, and the play’s antagonist. The
villain of the play, he murdered Hamlet’s father in order to obtain
the throne, then promptly married Hamlet’s mother, the widowed
Queen Gertrude. Claudius is a robust, scheming man driven by his
appetites and a lust for power, but he occasionally shows signs of
guilt and human feeling–his love for Gertrude, for instance, seems
entirely sincere.

Gertrude – The
Queen of Denmark, Hamlet’s mother. At the beginning of the play,
shortly after the death of her husband (Hamlet’s father), Gertrude
has married Claudius, the new king and her dead husband’s brother.
Gertrude loves Hamlet deeply, but she is a shallow, weak woman who
seeks affection and status more urgently than moral truth. She
refuses to listen to Hamlet when he attempts to persuade her of
Claudius’s wrongdoing, instead persisting in her belief that her
son has gone mad.

Polonius – The
Lord Chamberlain of Claudius’s court, a pompous, conniving old man.
Polonius is the father of Laertes and Ophelia; Hamlet accidentally
kills him as he hides behind a tapestry in Gertrude’s chamber,
spying on the queen’s meeting with her son.

Horatio –
Hamlet’s close friend, who studied with the prince at the
university in Wittenberg. Horatio is loyal and helpful to Hamlet
throughout the play; after Hamlet’s death at the end of the play,
Horatio remains alive to tell Hamlet’s story.

Ophelia –
Polonius’s daughter, a beautiful young woman with whom Hamlet has
been in love. As the play opens, however, Hamlet’s grief over his
father’s death drives thoughts of love from his mind, and his
disgust over his mother’s marriage to his uncle makes him deeply
cynical about women in general. Ophelia is a sweet and innocent young
girl, who obeys her father and her brother Laertes. She gives in to
Polonius’s schemes to spy on Hamlet. When Hamlet kills her father,
she lapses into madness, singing songs about flowers and finally
drowning in the river, amid the flower garlands she had gathered.

Laertes –
Polonius’s son and Ophelia’s brother, a young man who spends much
of the play in France. When Polonius is killed by Hamlet, Laertes
returns to Denmark in a fury, and collaborates with Claudius (or is
used by Claudius) in a scheme to murder Hamlet. Passionate and quick
to action, Laertes is a clear foil for the reflective prince.

Fortinbras –
The young Prince of Norway, whose father the king (also named
Fortinbras) was killed by Hamlet’s father (also named Hamlet). Now
Fortinbras wishes to attack Denmark to avenge his father’s honor,
making him a natural foil for Prince Hamlet.

The Ghost –
The specter of Hamlet’s recently deceased father, who appears on
the ramparts of Elsinore Castle late at night. The ghost tells Hamlet
(the only character to whom he speaks) that he was murdered by
Claudius, who poured poison into his ear while he napped in the
castle orchard. Later, the ghost appears to Hamlet during his
confrontation with Gertrude.

Rosencrantz and
Guildenstern – Two slightly bumbling courtiers, former friends of
Hamlet from Wittenberg, who are summoned by Claudius and Gertrude to
discover the cause of Hamlet’s strange behavior. Hamlet’s
realization that they are acting as the servants of the king and
queen strains their relationship; in the end, they are sent to
accompany Hamlet to England, bearing a letter from Claudius
instructing the English king to execute his nephew. Hamlet switches
the letter with one of his own devising, and Rosencrantz and
Guildenstern are executed instead.

Osric – The
foolish courtier who summons Hamlet to his duel with Laertes

Voltimand and
Cornelius – Courtiers whom Claudius sends to Denmark, to persuade
the king to prevent Fortinbras from attacking.

Marcellus and
Bernardo – The officers who first see the ghost walking the
ramparts of Elsinore, and who summon Horatio to witness it. Marcellus
is present when Hamlet first encounters the ghost.

Francisco – A
soldier and guardsman at Elsinore

Reynaldo –
Polonius’s servant, who is sent to France by Polonius to check up
on and spy on Laertes

Summary

In the dark
winter night, a ghost walks the ramparts of Elsinore Castle in
Denmark. Discovered first by a pair of watchmen, then by the scholar
Horatio, the ghost wears the visage and expression of the recently
deceased King Hamlet, whose brother Claudius has inherited the throne
and married the dead king’s widowed wife. When Horatio and the
watchmen bring Prince Hamlet, the dead king’s son, to see the
ghost, it speaks to him, declaring ominously that it is indeed his
father’s spirit, and that it was murdered by none other than
Claudius. Ordering Hamlet to seek revenge upon the man who usurped
his throne and married his wife, the ghost disappears with the coming
of dawn.

Prince Hamlet
devotes himself to avenging his father’s death, but, because he is
contemplative and thoughtful by nature, his heart is not fully in the
deed, and he delays, entering into a deep melancholy and even
apparent madness. The king and queen (Hamlet’s mother Gertrude)
worry about the prince’s erratic behavior, and attempt to discover
its cause. They employ a pair of Hamlet’s friends, Rosencrantz and
Guildenstern, to watch him. When Polonius, the pompous Lord
Chamberlain, suggests that Hamlet may be mad with love for his
daughter Ophelia, the king agrees to spy on him in conversation with
the girl. But though Hamlet certainly seems mad, he does not seem to
love Ophelia– he orders her to enter a nunnery and declares that he
wishes to ban marriages.

A group of
itinerant actors comes to Elsinore, and Hamlet seizes upon an idea to
test his uncle’s guilt: he will have the players perform a scene
closely resembling the sequence by which Hamlet imagines his uncle to
have murdered his father; if Claudius is guilty, he will surely
react. When the moment comes in the theater, Claudius leaps up and
leaves the room; Hamlet and Horatio agree that this proves his guilt.
Hamlet goes to kill Claudius, but finds him praying; he decides that
to kill him while in prayer would be to send his soul to heaven, and
that to do so would be an inadequate revenge. He decides to wait.
Claudius, now frightened of Hamlet’s madness and fearing for his
own safety, orders that Hamlet be sent at once to England.

Hamlet goes to
confront his mother, in whose bedchamber Polonius has hidden behind a
tapestry. Hearing a noise from behind the tapestry, Hamlet believes
the king is hiding there; he draws his sword and stabs through the
fabric, killing the unseen Polonius. For this crime, he is
immediately dispatched to England with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern.
However, Claudius’s plan for Hamlet includes more than banishment:
he has given Rosencrantz and Guildenstern sealed orders for the King
of England, demanding that Hamlet be put to death.

In the aftermath
of Polonius’s death, Ophelia goes mad with grief and drowns in the
river. Polonius’s son Laertes, who has been staying in France,
returns to Denmark in a rage. Claudius convinces him that Hamlet is
to blame for his father’s and sister’s deaths. At this point,
Horatio and the king receive letters from Hamlet indicating that the
prince has returned to Denmark after pirates attacked his ship en
route to England. Claudius concocts a plan to use Laertes’s desire
for revenge as a tool with which to achieve Hamlet’s death: Laertes
will fence with Hamlet in innocent sport, but Claudius will poison
his blade, so that if Laertes draws blood, Hamlet will die. As a
back-up plan, the king decides to poison a goblet, which he will give
Hamlet to drink should Hamlet score the first or second hits of the
match.

Hamlet returns
to the vicinity of Elsinore just as Ophelia’s funeral is taking
place; struck with grief, he attacks Laertes and declares that he had
in fact always loved Ophelia. Back at the castle, he tells Horatio
that he believes one must be prepared to die, since death could come
at any moment. A foolish courtier named Osric arrives on Claudius’s
orders to arrange the fencing match between Hamlet and Laertes.

The
sword-fighting begins. Hamlet scores the first hit, but declines to
drink from the king’s proffered goblet; instead, Gertrude takes a
drink from it, and is swiftly killed by the poison. Laertes succeeds
in wounding Hamlet, though he does not die of the poison immediately;
meanwhile, Laertes is cut by his own sword’s blade, and, after
revealing to Hamlet that Claudius is responsible for the queen’s
death, he dies from the blade’s poison. Hamlet then stabs Claudius
through with the poisoned sword and forces him to drink down the rest
of the poisoned wine. Claudius dies, and Hamlet dies immediately
after achieving his revenge.

At this moment,
a Norwegian prince named Fortinbras, who has led an army to Denmark
and attacked Poland earlier in the play, enters with the ambassadors
from England, who report that Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are dead.
Fortinbras is stunned by the gruesome sight in the castle: the entire
royal family lies sprawled on the floor, dead. He moves to take power
of the kingdom; Horatio, fulfilling Hamlet’s last request, steps
forward to tell him Hamlet’s tragic story. Fortinbras orders that
Hamlet be carried away in a manner befitting a fallen soldier.

Analysis

It may be
arguable whether Hamlet is Shakespeare’s greatest play, but it is
undoubtedly his most famous and most influential. Hamlet is, without
exaggeration, the most written-about, interpreted, and studied work
of literature in English. It has been read and analyzed exhaustively,
for its aesthetic, moral, political, psychological, historical,
allegorical, logical, religious, and philosophical aspects; there are
hundreds and even thousands of works devoted to each of these, and
books devoted as well to its characters, backgrounds, plots,
performances, and place in world theater as a whole. What this means,
of course, is that Hamlet supports a massive variety of
interpretations and understandings. There may be wrong ways to
understand the tragedy, but there is no single right way to
understand it: Hamlet is concerned with deep truths about the nature
of humanity in the universe, and it is no more reducible to a set of
simple themes than are the complicated questions arising from human
experience itself.

That said, there
are a number of clear, important themes that dominate the play and
form the core of its interpretability. Hamlet’s struggle over the
question of whether or not to murder Claudius presents Shakespeare
with an opportunity to explore giant questions. First among these is
the relationship in human life between thought and action; Hamlet’s
reflective, contemplative nature often renders it impossible for him
to act on his convictions, and many critics have described the
imbalance between his active and passive natures as a “tragic flaw”
that makes his wretched fate inevitable. Other important themes
explored in Hamlet include: the nature of justice and revenge; the
idea that sin must beget retribution; the line between sanity and
madness; the nature of political power and the connection between the
well-being of the state and the moral condition of its leaders (When
Hamlet declares that “Something is rotten in the state of Denmark,”
that “something” is Claudius); the moral question of suicide in a
malevolent universe (Hamlet longs to kill himself, but fears God’s
wrath in the afterlife); the relationship between sons and fathers
(Hamlet and the ghost, Laertes and Polonius, Fortinbras and the dead
King of Norway); the nature of the family; the inevitability of
death; and, against that inevitability, the question of truth, of
what human beings can cling to in a painful, unjust, and hostile
world–the question of what gives life meaning, of what lasts.

Hamlet, who is
in love with learning, thought, and reason, is driven closer and
closer to a kind of wild, unwilling nihilism, as every verity
(religion, society, philosophy, love) fails him or proves false. The
question of Hamlet’s sanity is one of the most hotly contested
critical controversies surrounding the play: does he actually lose
his mind, or does he only pretend to, as he claims? The answer is
probably that his decision to feign madness is a sane one, a
strategic move to confuse his enemies and conceal his intentions, but
also that his mind is so troubled, confused, and desperate in the
absence of any grounding truth that his pretense assumes the
intensity of real madness, and something of its quality as well.

Hamlet

Home Search
Reference Relax About SparkNotes Newsletter Contact

previous :: next
home :: shakespeare :: hamlet

Act I, Scenes
i-ii

Summary

On a dark winter
night outside Elsinore Castle in Denmark, an officer named Bernardo
comes to relieve the watchman Francisco. Cold, tired, and
apprehensive, Francisco thanks Bernardo, and hurries home to bed. As
Francisco leaves, Bernardo is joined by Marcellus, another watchman,
and Horatio, a friend of Prince Hamlet. In hushed tones, Marcellus
and Bernardo discuss the apparition they have seen for the past two
nights, and which they now hope to show Horatio: the ghost of the
recently deceased King Hamlet, which they claim has appeared before
them on the castle ramparts in the late hours of the night.

Horatio is
skeptical, but the ghost suddenly appears–and just as suddenly,
vanishes. Terrified, Horatio acknowledges that the specter does
indeed resemble the dead King of Denmark–he says the ghost even
wears the armor King Hamlet wore when he battled against the armies
of Norway, and the same frown he wore when he fought against the
Poles. Horatio declares that the ghost must bring warning of
impending misfortune for Denmark, perhaps in the form of a military
attack: he recounts the story of King Hamlet’s conquest of certain
lands once belonging to Norway, saying that Fortinbras, the young
prince of Norway, now seeks to re-conquer those forfeited lands. The
ghost reappears, and Horatio tries urgently to speak to it. The ghost
remains silent, however, and disappears again with the first hint of
dawn. Horatio suggests that they tell Prince Hamlet, the dead king’s
son, about the apparition; he believes the ghost will not refuse to
speak to his beloved son.

That morning,
the new king, the former king’s brother Claudius, gives a speech to
his courtiers about his recent marriage to Gertrude, his brother’s
widow and Hamlet’s mother. He says that he mourns his brother, but
has chosen to balance Denmark’s mourning with the delight of his
marriage. He says that young Fortinbras has written to him, rashly
demanding the surrender of the lands King Hamlet won from
Fortinbras’s father, and he dispatches Cornelius and Voltimand with
a message for the King of Norway, Fortinbras’s elderly uncle.

His speech
concluded, Claudius turns to Laertes, the son of the Lord Chamberlain
Polonius, and asks what business he has from the court. Laertes
answers that he wishes to return to France, where his stay was
recently cut short by Claudius’s coronation. Polonius tells
Claudius that Laertes has his permission to go, and Claudius jovially
gives Laertes his consent as well. Turning to Hamlet, Claudius asks
why “the clouds still hang” upon him: Hamlet is still wearing
black in mourning for the dead king. Gertrude urges him to cast it
off, but he replies bitterly that his inner sorrow is so great that
his dour appearance is merely a poor mirror of it. Claudius declares
that all fathers die, and that all sons must lose their fathers, and
that to mourn for too long is unmanly and inappropriate. Gertrude
asks Hamlet not to return to Wittenberg, where he had been studying
at the university, and he stiffly agrees to obey her. Professing to
be cheered by Hamlet’s decision to stay in Denmark, Claudius
escorts Gertrude from the room; the court follows, leaving Hamlet
alone.

Alone, Hamlet
says that he longs to evaporate, and wishes that God had not made
suicide a sin. Anguished, he laments his father’s death and his
mother’s hasty marriage to his uncle. He remembers how deeply in
love his mother and father had seemed, and curses the thought that
now–only a month after the king’s death–she has married his far
inferior brother. “Frailty,” he cries, “thy name is woman!”

Horatio enters
with Marcellus and Bernardo, and Hamlet, happy to see his friend,
asks why he has left Wittenberg. Horatio says that he came to see
King Hamlet’s funeral, and Hamlet curtly argues that he came to see
his mother’s wedding. Horatio agrees that the one followed closely
on the heels of the other. He then tells Hamlet that he, Marcellus,
and Bernardo have seen what appears to be his father’s ghost.
Stunned, Hamlet agrees to keep watch with them after night falls, in
the hopes that he will be able to speak to the apparition.

Commentary

With masterful
economy and grace Shakespeare sets his mood, introduces his major
characters, presents his background information, begins his
exploration of the play’s major themes, and sets his plot in
motion, all within two short scenes. The only major plot strand not
established in this section is that of Hamlet’s relationship with
Ophelia, who appears in the following scene. Other than that
omission, these two scenes introduce all the major strands that will
wind throughout the play. The appearance of the ghost affords the
characters the opportunity to tell the audience about the recent
death of King Hamlet and the history of his conflict with Poland
(which in turn introduces the idea that Fortinbras has a grudge
against Denmark), Claudius’s speech informs us of his marriage to
Gertrude, and Hamlet’s bitterness toward Claudius and his
subsequent soliloquy establishes his melancholy and desperation over
those events. The revelation of the ghost’s appearance, and
Hamlet’s decision to confront the apparition, sets in motion the
main plot of the play, which will culminate in Hamlet’s death at
the end of Act V.

The appearance
of the ghost on a chilling, misty night outside Elsinore Castle
introduces the element of the supernatural into the play, and
indicates immediately that, as Hamlet puts it later, “the time is
out of joint”: something is wrong in Denmark. Despite the apparent
vitality of Claudius’s court, Shakespeare tells us, trouble is
clearly on the horizon–Horatio interprets the ghost as a warning
about Fortinbras. Hamlet, devastated by his father’s death and
betrayed by his mother’s marriage, already feels that “something
is rotten in the state of Denmark”; his bitterness, his cynicism,
his yearning for suicide, and the other characters’ remarks about
his eccentric behavior indicate the extent to which Hamlet is not his
usual self. In fact, nothing in Denmark is usual: the play opens
immediately after the disruption of a very long, stable, and
uneventful period under the reign of King Hamlet. One of the most
extraordinary qualities of these first two scenes is their ability to
convey that impression, and something of what the previous period
itself was actually like, without ever showing it to us directly.

Похожие страницы:

HamletEssay, ResearchPaper The Inanition of Hamlet William Shakespeare s Hamlet, is one of the best ... an exquisite sense of moral conduct. Doubting the ghost s revelation, he ... Richardson, who praises Hamlet s exquisite sense of moral conduct . On the ship ...

HamletEssay, ResearchPaperHamlet is based on a young prince ... the real reason for Hamlet’s behavior. Hamlet insults them at every ... of being Hamlet’s friends for the journey. The King’s conduct in ... Hamlets well being. This conduct of Claudius gives him the ...

HamletEssay, ResearchPaperHamlet went through various emotional states ... has never really come in contact with the dark side of ... interesting thoughts on Hamlet (non-inclusive of my paper). Hamlet was actually a woman ...

HamletEssay, ResearchPaper Act I, Scene I – It is midnight ... to tell Hamlet that Claudius has set up a fencing contest and a wager ... , pitting Hamlet against Laertes, if Hamlet will agree. Hamlet does ...